Friday, July 25, 2008

You May Already Be Under Attack....

Slashdot has an interesting link to an article about the fact that malware authors have been targeting Blogger (which is the blogging engine that powers this blog along with millions of others) heavily. Since Blogger is owned by Google, this means that about 2% of all malware is hosted by Google. There are three big reasons for this:

It is easy to automate setting up a blog on Blogger

It is easy to set up Blogger to redirect links to another site

Blogger is owned by Google so it's blogs are automatically indexed by Google's search engine

As a result malware authors are drawn to Blogger and set up 16,000 malicious web pages every day—Google simply can't flag and delete these pages fast enough. It's an interesting phenomenon that is repeated over and over again. Call it the "Windows Effect"—a computer product or service becomes so popular that it becomes ubiquituous and it will inevitably be targeted and attacked by hackers. Just like Windows in general and Internet Explorer in particular have been (and still are) popular targets for hackers, now it's Google's turn. And it's not just Google either. MySpace and Facebook are also popular malware targets. Congratulations guys, you've been pulled into the same infamous club that Microsoft has been trying to kick and scream its way out of for years.